"Paola de Santo's The Ambassador and the Courtesan pairs two seemingly disparate figures whose roles expanded during early modernity in complementary, overlapping, and even hybrid ways. A broad-reaching contribution spanning historical, literary, and visual case studies, this volume offers a fresh look at the metaphor of the body politic as navigated by men and women who held a special, but inevitably complex, relationship to power structures, including through forms of opportunity but also instrumentalization, violability, erasure, and estrangement. While grounded in the Italian context, this volume will also be of interest to readers and scholars of early modern Europe more broadly." - Jessica Goethals, author of Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court (2023) "Drawing on philology, gender theory, and material culture studies, De Santo expertly surveys a rich variety of written and visual sources in search for their bodies--worshipped, exploited, or dismembered by others and protected, disguised, or sensually revealed by garments. Her insightful study uncovers original and significant connections between diplomacy, seduction, power, and identity formation in early-modern Italy. [.] This sophisticated yet eminently readable volume, with its original and lively translations and illuminating notes, will serve both scholars and students of early-modern European literature, political science, history, material culture, and gender studies." - Caterina Mongiat Farina, author of Questione di lingua.

L'ideologia del dibattito sull'italiano nel Cinquecento (2014).